Into D3 a little more

I’ve gone a little ways further into D3. I read some user comments on other sites about how this game sucked. Most of their comments are related to how it doesn’t look cutting edge, there isn’t a whole lot of world to explore. By far, the two loudest complaints are that there is lack of character development, and the DRM sucks.

The DRM for this game is that you have to be connected to battle.net to play. Even if you are playing a single player game, you need to connect to battle.net. That’s kind of a drag..but tbh, I don’t have a huge problem with it. After the first couple of days…I haven’t had a problem connection to battle.net to play. Initially there were server problems and time out issues…etc. I don’t think they are all corrected completely yet, I have had some lag at times, but it’s definitely better. I played lots of EQ, having to connect to the net isn’t an issue for me.

The character development “problem” is clearly a complaint from people that haven’t gotten into the game. Initially, I thought it was going to be a drag too…but the “development” of the character comes in the player deciding what skills to use as you go in to battle. You can’t switch on the fly…so you have to decide before you go in to an area what will benefit you most. I didn’t realize how big a deal this was until I got into an isolated boss area last night.

I’ve only played the barbarian so far…I might go with something else later, but I’m having a good time with the hack and slash. So I moved into an area of a dungeon, and suddenly it became clear I was going to go toe to toe with a minor boss. Not one of the “special characters”, this was an actual “boss” type NPC. To get to this point, I had the character set up to efficiently clear gobs and gobs of NPC’s at the same time. I’d routinely take on 10 guys at once…so I have him setup to slash (hit multiple enemies), his “power” move is a ripple effect, that hits several NPC’s infront of you, and I had his passive weapon skill set to more critical hits (since I was swinging more). Now I get to this boss….and I would have liked to have an entirely different setup. I would have liked to have my “one hit” skill set, my “one hit” power move set and my defensive weapon skill setup. I didn’t get an opportunity to set that up. I made a choice and it affected the fight. The other skills are available to me…I just could’t switch them out during battle.

I thought it was kind of interesting. I leveled up a couple of times last night, and even more skills opened up. It’s making it more and more of a decision which options to setup before a battle. That’s the direction Diablo has moved with their character development…and I’m diggin on it. Also, there is far more thought in what weapons you want to use in given places. There is a lot more testing and switching to see what “feels” better.

The hours of something to do I’m going to get out of this game was well worth the 60 bucks I spent.